"Fra Angelico stood apart from the growth of art that was taking place about him," said Mr. Sumner. "He neither affected it nor was affected by it. We should call him to-day an 'ecstatic painter'--one who paints visions; the Italians then called him 'Il Beato,' the blessed. There are many other works by him,--although a great part, between forty and fifty, are here. You remember the _Madonna and Child_ you saw in the Uffizi Gallery the other day, on whose wide gold frame are painted those angels with musical instruments that are reproduced so widely and sold everywhere. You recognized them at once, I saw. Then, a few pictures have been carried away and are in foreign art galleries, as I told you the other day. During the last years of his life the Pope sent for him to come to Rome, and there he painted frescoes on the walls of some rooms in the Vatican Palace. From that city he went to Orvieto, a little old city perched on the top of a hill on the way from Florence to Rome, in whose cathedral he painted a noble _Christ_, with prophets, saints, and angels. He died in Rome."
"And was he not buried here?" asked Barbara; "here in this lovely inner court, where are the graves of so many monks?"
"No. He was buried in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, a church close by the Pantheon in Rome, and the Pope himself wrote his epitaph. But it is indeed a great pity that he could not lie here, in the very midst of so many of his works, and where he lived so long."
"Did Fra Angelico live before or after the prophet Savonarola, uncle?" asked Margery. "We came here a little time ago with mother to visit the latter's cell, and the church, in connection with our reading of 'Romola.'"
"He lived before Savonarola, about a hundred years. So that when Savonarola used to walk about through these rooms and corridors, he saw the same pictures we are now looking at."
"I say, uncle, don't you think I am having the best part of this, after all?" brightly asked Malcom, the following day, as Mr. Sumner entered the wide sunny room where he was lying on the sofa, propped up by cushions, while Barbara, Bettina, and Margery were clustered about him with their hands full of photographs of Fra Angelico's paintings, and all trying to talk at once. "The girls have told me everything; and I am almost sure I shall never mistake a Fra Angelico picture. I know just what expression he put into his faces, just how quiet and as-if-they-never-could-be-used his hands are, and how straight the folds of his draperies hang, even though the people who wear them are dancing. I know what funny little clouds, like bundles of cigars, his Madonnas sit upon up in the heavens.